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June 2010

Bradley Kreit at The Institute for the Future blogged about how under high pressure situations it's better to take breaks, shift attention, and do other "counterintuitive" things.

I'm here to argue it's not counterintuitive.

Oh, sure it is if you've been raised in an environment that's punitive, where as a kid you learned to act very very concerned so that even if you didn't perform well, no one would doubt you were "trying your best."

But if you have been developed by people (family, schoolteachers, friends' parents) who ASSUME you're trying you're best, then over time you learn how to optimize your own performance, and you can learn not to overschedule yourself, or work frantically with diminishing returns.